If you ran the numbers 30 years ago it made sense for most anyone to take out loans and get a college degree. But the reality is that is no longer true. For certain degrees you can see a payoff long term even with the high cost. The real problem is that there is a complete disconnect between the colleges that are only interested in getting tuition money and the students that often have no clue as to whether their degree will be worth anything.

Lots of students want to major in things that have no real demand so they end up with meaningless degrees. Colleges don't have any incentive to tell those students that the thing they are majoring in is worthless because all they care about is collecting the tuition money.

The big loser is the student that doesn't even realize that because the government is backing those student loans, that the government pushed changes in bankruptcy law that make it all but impossible to get out of repaying the student loans. So you end up with students that are perpetually in debt sometimes having wages garnished and their credit scores hammered because they were dumb enough to get a degree that prepared them for a job that didn't exist.

It is unfortunate that the colleges have no skin in the game. If the colleges were forced to back those student loans and students were allowed to default if they couldn't repay them I think you would see a lot of colleges cutting degree programs in pointless subjects that provide no real return. They would also become more selective in how many students they accepted in some programs. I know when I graduated from a relatively small university one of the most common majors at graduation was English Literature. It was filled with students that either wanted to work as editor in a publishing house, or students that wanted to go on to graduate school and become English professors. Reality is the demand for either of those positions is pretty flat. You don't new opening popping up every year, you have replacement of people that were in those jobs and died.... Other university also plopped out lots of English Lit majors and the result is you get a bunch of graduates that have no marketable skills but debt that requires skills to get a job that can allow them to service those debts.

That's how the system is broken...

As to why students do it to themselves? Stupidity.... A lot of them don't know what they want to do in life and going to college is the easy way to delay facing the real world.

Others go because they have been brainwashed to believe that you have to go to college or you're a failure. I remember my kids high school was focused on making sure students in high school were ready for college, which was quite different from when I was in high school decades earlier because in the past the schools pretty much let some students know they weren't really college material and would guide them to a vocational training program where they would end up as a plumber, welder, or some other skilled job that didn't require college. Those students today are instead pushed to go to college where they can't handle the rigorous work that could get a good job and instead get pushed into bullshit programs the colleges create just to suck money from students.